Performing Indigeneity in Bolivia: Masks and Protest in the Struggle over the TIPNIS

A lecture by Nancy Postero, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego, as part of the Spring Colloquium 2016 series,"Political Imaginaries Across Latin America and the Caribbean."

Date

Time

Location

Monday

Mar. 21

7:00pm
-
10:00pm

KJCC, Auditorium
53 Washington Square South

As part of the Colloquium Series Political Imaginaries Across Latin America and the Caribbean, CLACS at NYU is hosting a lecture by Nancy Postero, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego.

In response to Bolivian president Evo Morales’s 2010 plan to build a highway through the TIPNIS national park and indigenous territories, indigenous organizations organized two marches. In this paper, we analyze the semiotics of protest surrounding the controversy to examine how this complex and multi-layered situation was distilled into a simplistic event, a binary narrative pitting the MAS state against indigenous TIPNIS protestors. Using the concepts of masking and figurations, we examine the diverse imaginaries and political performances of many of the actors in this political drama, including the Bolivian state defending its development agenda, indigenous social movements protesting the road, and feminists working in solidarity with indigenous protesters. The analysis draws attention to the ways public performances can often obscure the everyday effects of state making and national development strategies. Yet, we insist that, even as actors negotiate with and resist the State, their performances, too, can reproduce multiple layers of inequality.

Nancy Postero is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego. She is the author of Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Post-multicultural Bolivia (Stanford 2007). She has edited several collections and special journal issues including: The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America (Sussex 2003 with Leon Zamosc); Living in Actually Existing Democracies (Latin American Research Review 2010 with Phil Oxhorn); Neoliberalism, Interrupted, Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America (Stanford 2013 with Mark Goodale); The Politics of Indigeneity in Bolivia, Past and Present (Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 2013); and Performance Politics: Spectacular Productions of Culture in Contemporary Latin America, (Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 2014 with Nicole Fabricant). She is completing a new book focusing on race, politics, and performance in plurinational Bolivia.

Thomas Abercrombie, Associate Proferssor of Anthropology at NYU, will serve as a discussant for this lecture